1/ I've always been interested in philosophy, but it's always been confusing where to start. Thanks to the Twitters, I've found a wedge: Sophie's World.
2/ Sophie's World is a fascinating introductory course in philosophy that starts with Thales and guides you all the way to Jean Paul Satre, explaining how philosophers throughout time built upon their predecessors to try to answer the hardest questions about humankind.
3/ I've just finished reading the book. What Twitter giveth, I giveth back. What follows are a portion of my notes. Hopefully this hooks you as much as it hooked me. Let's get started with the natural philosophers...
4/ The Natural Philosophers were the first and earliest kind of philosophers. They concerned themselves with the natural world and its processes. The first of them is Thales.
5/ Greeks at this time attributed every natural phenomenon to "the whim of the Gods". Lack of rain? Typhon must have surely stolen Zeus' thunder. Earthquake? Yeah, the gods are fighting in the Olympus. And then, out of nowhere, comes Thales.
6/ Thales broke from the use of mythology to explain the world and the universe, and instead attempted to explain natural objects and phenomena by rational hypotheses.
7/ For example, rather than assuming that earthquakes were the result of supernatural whims Thales explained them by hypothesizing that the Earth floats on water and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves.
8/ He also focused on explaining nature as deriving from a unity of everything based on the existence of a single ultimate substance, which he believed to be water.
9/ He was of course still wrong about that, but the way of thinking set the stage for scientific philosophy to evolve. Spoiler: The search for this "substance" from which everything is made of is going to be key as we progress through the natural philosophers.
10/ After Thales came Anaximander. Now he beileved that our world is one of many that form and dissolve from a basic substance he called "the boundless". He thought that this source-substance was not ordinary, that it had to be different than the things created.
11/ Anaximander had two notable students: Pythagoras, the great mathematician that figured out that all angles of a triangle equal 180º, and Anaximenes. He also thought that there was one source-substance, but thought that this substance was "air".
12/ Anaximenes thought that water was "compressed air", and that earth is "compressed water". Brilliant intuition if we remember that the concept of atoms hadn't been developed yet. But we'll get there.
13/ After Anaximenes, a school of thought emerged called the Eleatics. They were concerned with the Problem of Change: How could one substance suddenly change into something else?
14/ The founder of this movement was Parmenides, who believed that everything that exists had always existed, and that there was no such thing as actual change. Nothing could become anything other than what it was. Sensory perceptions must therefore be unreliable.
15/ Parmenides had a contemporary that fully disagreed with him: Heraclitus. He believed that constant change was the most basic characteristic of nature. Everything flows. When I step into the river twice, neither I nor the river are the same.
16/ He takes it to a real extreme, though. He takes it to such an extreme that he actually became the first person to think of relativity. His idea was that the world was in such constant flux that everything both is and isn’t at the same time.
17/ He even rejected the idea of existing, insisting that everything is in a constant state of changing from one thing into another, so no one thing actually exists as we might think of it existing, it is only an expression of constant change.
18/ He saw the world was characterized by opposites (no summer without a winter). Who decides what should flow into what, though? Heraclitus believed in a "universal reason" or "universal law" that guides everything that happens in nature, i.e. "God" or "logos".
19/ On the other hand, Heraclitus was also a spoiled rich kid who hated everything and everyone. He was born in Ephesus to a really wealthy family and he spent his entire life as a philosopher looking down on people.
20/ This is why, while he does have really beautiful and mysterious quotes like “the upward-downward path is one and the same,” he also has quotes like “Everyone is too stupid to understand my philosophy, everyone who tries makes themselves look stupid” (paraphrased 😅)
21/ Anyway. These two were opposed. Parmenides thought that what is, is, and Heraclitus thought that nothing is, everything flows. Reason vs senses. Who was right?
